Animal Crossing: New Horizons: When do NPCs visit your island?
Ever wonder which NPCs will be visiting your island on a given day in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? It’s not always clear but there is a pattern.
Sometimes you’ll get on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, hit up your island and suddenly run into Saharah. Maybe you’ll look at your map and see Redd’s ship is at the beach. Maybe you’ll run through the town hall and bump into Kicks like I did today.
Luckily we’ve at least figured out SOME information to at least give you an idea of when the visiting NPCs might be visiting and even when they probably won’t. Not all NPCs are created equal so to best explain this we’re going to break these NPCs in groups.
For the sake of fun, I’ll call these four groups “Clockworks,” “Weeklies,” “Cameos,” and “Night Owls”. Each group consists of several NPCS that follow specific habits.
Clockworks (K.K. Slider, Daisy Mae)
The Clockwork gang consists of NPCs that always show up at the same time on the same day regardless of anything else going on.
K.K. Slider is always going to show up Saturdays in the evening. Turnip seller, Daisy Mae, is always going to show up Sunday mornings. You know, like clockwork.
Weeklies (Saharah, Lief, Kicks)
The Weeklies gang are guaranteed to show up once a week though it will be random and only one will show up on a given day. For example, if you have Kicks, don’t expect Lief and Saharah that day.
Cameos (Redd, Label, Gulliver, Flick, C.J.)
Cameos are usually some of the most popular of the NPCs and a lot of them deal with the fact that sometimes they’re just really hard to get. There’s a reason for this. Every week you only get two of them and those two will only appear once that week.
If you get Flick on Monday and then see Gulliver on Tuesday, you’re not seeing any of the rest of the gang until next week. Fortunately the three that did not show up will take priority. If you do the math, you have a one in five chance of encountering your NPC of choice. If you don’t see them this week, you have a one in three chance next week.
Night Owls (Celeste, Wisp)
Night Owls are pretty random with only one constant, they only come out at night.
Celeste, the star loving owl (and literal night owl), will show up on a clear night. On the plus side, Isabelle will give you a heads up when you start playing that day, that it’ll be a clear night that night.
Wisp, on the other hand, has a schedule as inexpiable as the character itself. He’ll appear late at night (I’ve encountered Wisp as last as 2:00 a.m.). Both are odd though because I, admittedly, haven’t encountered either in about three weeks.
If this article is a little “TL;DR” for you, Reddit user 8BitBish put together this killer graphic to help you understand it a bit better.
"Put together this graphic to visualise when you will see certain characters on your island. from AnimalCrossing"
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